American Eloquence, Volume 2 Studies In American Political History (1896)

Project Gutenberg's American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4), by Various

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4)

       Studies In American Political History (1896)

Author: Various

Release Date: March 17, 2005 [EBook #15392]

Last Updated: November 15, 2012

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMERICAN ELOQUENCE, II. ***

Produced by David Widger

AMERICAN ELOQUENCE

STUDIES IN AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY

Edited with Introduction by Alexander Johnston

Reedited by James Albert Woodburn

Volume II. (of 4)

CONTENTS

V. — THE ANTI-SLAVERY STRUGGLE

RUFUS KING,

WILLIAM PINKNEY,

WENDELL PHILLIPS,

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS,

JOHN C. CALHOUN,

DANIEL WEBSTER,

HENRY CLAY,

WENDELL PHILLIPS,

CHARLES SUMNER,

ILLUSTRATIONS

Rufus King

John Q. Adams

John C. Calhoun

Daniel Webster

Henry Clay

Portrait Artists

RUFUS KING — From a steel engraving.

JOHN Q. ADAMS — From a painting by MARCHANT.

JOHN C. CALHOUN — From a daguerreotype by BRADY.

DANIEL WEBSTER — From a painting by R. M. STAIGG.

HENRY CLAY — From a crayon portrait.

INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED VOLUME II.

The second volume of the American Eloquence is devoted exclusively to the Slavery controversy. The new material of the revised edition includes Rufus King and William Pinkney on the Missouri Question; John Quincy Adams on the War Power of the Constitution over Slavery; Sumner on the Repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. The addition of the new material makes necessary the reservation of the orations on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and on the related subjects, for the third volume.

In the anti-slavery struggle the Missouri question occupied a prominent place. In the voluminous Congressional material which the long debates called forth, the speeches of King and Pinkney are the best representatives of the two sides to the controversy, and they are of historical interest and importance. John Quincy Adams' leadership in the dramatic struggle over the right of petition in the House of Representatives, and his opinion on the constitutional power of the national government over the institution of slavery within the States, will always excite the attention of the historical student.

In the decade before the war no subject was a greater cause of irritation and antagonism between the States than the Fugitive Slave Law. Sumner's speech on this subject is the most valuable of his speeches from the historical point of view; and it is not only a worthy American oration, but it is a valuable contribution to the history of the slavery struggle itself. It has been thought desirable to include in a volume of this character orations of permanent value on these themes of historic interest. A study of the speeches of a radical innovator like Phillips with those of compromising conservatives like Webster and Clay, will lead the student into a comparison, or contrast, of these diverse characters. The volume retains the two orations of Phillips, the two greatest of all his contributions to the anti-slavery struggle. It is believed that the list of orations, on the whole, presents to the reader a series of subjects of first importance in the great slavery controversy.

The valuable introduction of Professor Johnston, on The Anti-Slavery Struggle, is re-printed entire.

J. A. W.

V. — THE ANTI-SLAVERY STRUGGLE

Negro slavery was introduced into all the English colonies of North America as a custom, and not under any warrant of law. The enslavement of the negro race was simply a matter against which no white person chose to enter a protest, or make resistance, while the negroes themselves were powerless to resist or even protest. In due course of time laws were passed by the Colonial Assemblies to protect property in negroes, while the home government, to the very last, actively protected and encouraged the slave trade to the colonies. Negro slavery in all the colonies had thus passed from custom to law before the American Revolution broke out; and the course of the Revolution itself had little or no effect on the system.

From the beginning, it was evident that the course of slavery in the two sections, North and South, was to be altogether divergent. In the colder North, the dominant race found it easier to work than to compel negroes to work: in the warmer South, the case was exactly reversed. At the close of the Revolution, Massachusetts led the way in an abolition of slavery, which was followed gradually by the other States north of Virginia; and in 1787 the ordinance of Congress organizing the Northwest Territory made all the future States north of the Ohio free States. Mason and Dixon's line and the Ohio River thus seemed, in 1790, to be the natural boundary between the free and the slave States.

Up to this point the white race in the two sections had dealt with slavery by methods which were simply divergent, not antagonistic. It was true that the percentage of slaves in the total population had been very rapidly decreasing in the North and not in the South, and that the gradual abolition of slavery was proceeding in the North alone, and that with increasing rapidity. But there was no positive evidence that the South was bulwarked in favor of slavery; there was no certainty but that the South would in its turn and in due time come to the point which the North had already reached, and begin its own abolition of slavery. The language of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Henry, and Mason, in regard to the evils or the wickedness of the system of slavery, was too strong to be heard with patience in the South of after years; and in this section it seems to have been true, that those who thought at all upon the subject hoped sincerely for the gradual abolition of slavery in the South. The hope, indeed, was rather a sentiment than a purpose, but there seems to have been no good reason, before 1793, why the sentiment should not finally develop into a purpose.

All this was permanently changed, and the slavery policy of the South was made antagonistic to, and not merely divergent from, that of the North, by the invention of Whitney's saw gin for cleansing cotton in 1793. It had been known, before that year, that cotton could be cultivated in the South, but its cultivation was made unprofitable, and checked by the labor required to separate the seeds from the cotton. Whitney's invention increased the efficiency of this labor hundreds of times, and it became evident at once that the South enjoyed a practical monopoly of the production of cotton. The effect on the slavery policy of the South was immediate and unhappy. Since 1865, it has been found that the cotton monopoly of the South is even more complete under a free than under a slave labor system, but mere theory could never have convinced the Southern people that such would be the case. Their whole prosperity hinged on one product; they began its cultivation under slave labor; and the belief that labor and prosperity were equally dependent on the enslavement of the laboring race very soon made the dominant race active defenders of slavery. From that time the system in the South was one of slowly but steadily increasing rigor, until, just before 1860, its last development took the form of legal enactments for the re-enslavement of free negroes, in default of their leaving the State in which they resided. Parallel with this increase of rigor, there was a steady change in the character of the system. It tended very steadily to lose its original patriarchal character, and take the aspect of a purely commercial speculation. After 1850, the commercial aspect began to be the rule in the black belt of the Gulf States. The plantation knew only the overseer; so many slaves died to so many bales of cotton; and the slave population began to lose all human connection with the dominant race.

The acquisition of Louisiana in 1803 more than doubled the area of the United States, and far more than doubled the area of the slave system. Slavery had been introduced into Louisiana, as usual, by custom, and had then been sanctioned by Spanish and French law. It is true that Congress did not forbid slavery in the new territory of Louisiana; but Congress did even worse than this; under the guise of forbidding the importation of slaves into Louisiana, by the act of March 26, 1804, organizing the territory, the phrase except by a citizen of the United States, removing into said territory for actual settlement, and being at the time of such removal bona fide owner of such slave or slaves, impliedly legitimated the domestic slave trade to Louisiana, and legalized slavery wherever population should extend between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains. The Congress of 1803-05, which passed the act, should rightfully bear the responsibility for all the subsequent growth of slavery, and for all the difficulties in which it involved the South and the country.

There were but two centres of population in Louisiana, New Orleans and St. Louis. When the southern district, around New Orleans, applied for admission as the slave State of Louisiana, there seems to have been no surprise or opposition on this score; the Federalist opposition to the admission is exactly represented by Quincy's speech in the first volume. When the northern district, around St. Louis, applied for admission as the slave State of Missouri, the inevitable consequences of the act of 1804 became evident for the first time, and all the Northern States united to resist the admission. The North controlled the House of Representatives, and the South the Senate; and, after a severe parliamentary struggle, the two bodies united in the compromise of 1820. By its terms Missouri was admitted as a slave State, and slavery was forever forbidden in the rest of Louisiana Territory, north of latitude 36° 30' (the line of the southerly boundary of Missouri). The instinct of this first struggle against slavery extension seems to have been much the same as that of 1846-60 the realization that a permission to introduce slavery by custom into the Territories meant the formation of slave States exclusively, the restriction of the free States to the district between the Mississippi and the Atlantic, and the final conversion of the mass of the United States to a policy of enslavement of labor. But, on the surface, it was so entirely a struggle for the balance of power between the two sections, that it has not seemed worth while to introduce any of the few reported speeches of the time. The topic is more fully and fairly discussed in the subsequent debates on the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

In 1830 William Lloyd Garrison, a Boston printer, opened the real anti-slavery struggle. Up to this time the anti-slavery sentiment, North and South, had been content with the notion of gradual abolition, with the hope that the South would, in some yet unsuspected manner, be brought to the Northern policy. This had been supplemented, to some extent, by the colonization society for colonizing negroes on the west coast of Africa; which had two aspects: at the South it was the means of ridding the country of the free negro population; at the North it was a means of mitigating, perhaps of gradually abolishing, slavery. Garrison, through his newspaper, the Liberator, called for immediate abolition of slavery, for the conversion of anti-slavery sentiment into anti-slavery purpose. This was followed by the organization of his adherents into the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, and the active dissemination of the immediate abolition principle by tracts, newspapers, and lecturers.

The anti-slavery struggle thus begun, never ceased until, in 1865, the Liberator ceased to be published, with the final abolition of slavery. In its inception and in all its development the movement was a distinct product of the democratic spirit. It would not have been possible in 1790, or in 1810, or in 1820. The man came with the hour; and every new mile of railroad or telegraph, every new district open to population, every new influence toward the growth of democracy, broadened the power as well as the field of the abolition movement. It was but the deepening, the application to an enslaved race of laborers, of the work which Jeffersonian democracy had done, to remove the infinitely less grievous restraints upon the white laborer thirty year before. It could never have been begun until individualism at the North had advanced so far that there was a reserve force of mind—ready to reject all the influences of heredity and custom upon thought. Outside of religion there was no force so strong at the North as the reverence for the Constitution; it was significant of the growth of individualism, as well as of the anti-slavery sentiment, that Garrison could safely begin his work with the declaration that the Constitution itself was a league with death and a covenant with hell.

The Garrisonian programme would undoubtedly have been considered highly objectionable by the South, even under to comparatively colorless slavery policy of 1790. Under the conditions to which cotton culture had advanced in 1830, it seemed to the South nothing less than a proposal to destroy, root and branch, the whole industry of that section, and it was received with corresponding indignation. Garrisonian abolitionists were taken and regarded as public enemies, and rewards were even offered for their capture. The germ of abolitionism in the Border States found a new and aggressive public sentiment arrayed against it; and an attempt to introduce gradual abolition in Virginia in 1832-33 was hopelessly defeated. The new question was even carried into Congress. A bill to prohibit the transportation of abolition documents by the Post-Office department was introduced, taken far enough to put leading men of both parties on the record, and then dropped. Petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia were met by rules requiring the reference of such petitions without reading or action; but this only increased the number of petitions, by providing a new grievance to be petitioned against, and in 1842 the gag rule was rescinded. Thence-forth the pro-slavery members of Congress could do nothing, and could only become more exasperated under a system of passive resistance.

Even at the North, indifferent or politically hostile as it had hitherto shown itself to the expansion of slavery, the new doctrines were received with an outburst of anger which seems to have been primarily a revulsion against their unheard of individualism. If nothing, which had been the object of unquestioning popular reverence, from the Constitution down or up to the church organizations, was to be sacred against the criticism of the Garrisonians, it was certain that the innovators must submit for a time to a general proscription. Thus the Garrisonians were ostracised socially, and became the Ishmalites of politics. Their meetings were broken up by mobs, their halls were destroyed, their schools were attacked by all the machinery of society and legislation, their printing presses were silenced by force or fraud, and their lecturers came to feel that they had not done their work with efficiency if a meeting passed without the throwing of stones or eggs at the building or the orators. It was, of course, inevitable that such a process should bring strong minds to the aid of the Garrisonians, at first from sympathy with persecuted individualism, and finally from sympathy with the cause itself; and in this way Garrisonianism was in a great measure relieved from open mob violence about 1840, though it never escaped it altogether until abolition meetings ceased to be necessary. One of the first and greatest reinforcements was the appearance of Wendell Phillips, whose speech at Faneuil Hall in 1839 was one of the first tokens of a serious break in the hitherto almost unanimous public opinion against Garrisonianism. Lovejoy, a Western anti-slavery preacher and editor, who had been driven from one place to another in Missouri and Illinois, had finally settled at Alton, and was there shot to death while defending his printing press against a mob. At a public meeting in Faneuil Hall, the Attorney-General of Massachusetts, James T. Austin, expressing what was doubtless the general sentiment of the time as to such individual insurrection against pronounced public opinion, compared the Alton mob to the Boston tea-party, and declared that Lovejoy, presumptuous and imprudent, had died as the fool dieth. Phillips, an almost unknown man, took the stand, and answered in the speech which opens this volume. A more powerful reinforcement could hardly have been looked for; the cause which could find such a defender was henceforth to be feared rather than despised. To the day of his death he was, fully as much as Garrison, the incarnation of the anti-slavery spirit. For this reason his address on the Philosophy of the Abolition Movement, in 1853, has been assigned a place as representing fully the abolition side of the question, just before it was overshadowed by the rise of the Republican party, which opposed only the extension of slavery to the territories.

The history of the sudden development of the anti-slavery struggle in 1847 and the following years, is largely given in the speeches which have been selected to illustrate it. The admission of Texas to the Union in 1845, and the war with Mexico which followed it, resulted in the acquisition of a vast amount of new territory by the United States. From the first suggestion of such an acquisition, the Wilmot proviso (so-called from David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, who introduced it in Congress), that slavery should be prohibited in the new territory, was persistently offered as an amendment to every bill appropriating money for the purchase of territory from Mexico. It was passed by the House of Representatives, but was balked in the Senate; and the purchase was finally made without any proviso. When the territory came to be organized, the old question came up again: the Wilmot proviso was offered as an amendment. As the territory was now in the possession of the United States, and as it had been acquired in a war whose support had been much more cordial at the South than at the North, the attempt to add the Wilmot proviso to the territorial organization raised the Southern opposition to an intensity which it had not known before. Fuel was added to the flame by the application of California, whose population had been enormously increased by the discovery of gold within her limits, for admission as a free State. If New Mexico should do the same, as was probable, the Wilmot proviso would be practically in force throughout the best portion of the Mexican acquisition. The two sections were now so strong and so determined that compromise of any kind was far more difficult than in 1820; and it was not easy to reconcile or compromise the southern demand that slavery should be permitted, and the northern demand that slavery should be forbidden, to enter the new territories.

In the meantime, the Presidential election of 1848 had come and gone. It had been marked by the appearance of a new party, the Free Soilers, an event which was at first extremely embarrassing to the managers of both the Democratic and Whig parties. On the one hand, the northern and southern sections of the Whig party had always been very loosely joined together, and the slender tie was endangered by the least admission of the slavery issue. On the other hand, while the Democratic national organization had always been more perfect, its northern section had always been much more inclined to active anti-slavery work than the northern Whigs. Its organ, the Democratic Review, habitually spoke of the slaves as our black brethren; and a long catalogue could be made of leaders like Chase, Hale, Wilmot, Bryant, and Leggett, whose democracy was broad enough to include the negro. To both parties, therefore, the situation was extremely hazardous. The Whigs had less to fear, but were able to resist less pressure. The Democrats were more united, but were called upon to meet a greater danger. In the end, the Whigs did nothing; their two sections drew further apart; and the Presidential election of 1852 only made it evident that the national Whig party was no longer in existence. The Democratic managers evolved, as a solution of their problem, the new doctrine of popular sovereignty, which Calhoun re-baptized squatter sovereignty. They asserted as the true Democratic doctrine, that the question of slavery or freedom was to be left for decision of the people of the territory itself. To the mass of northern Democrats, this doctrine was taking enough to cover over the essential nature of the struggle; the more democratic leaders of the northern Democracy were driven off